132      LONDON LIFE  IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Portuguese Jews had settled in London. These, the Jews of the
Sephardim, were for the most part rich and respected. The beginning
of the Ashkenazim settlement in London consisting of Jews using the
German ritual dates from the end of the seventeenth century. The first
Synagogue of the Ashkenazi was established in Duke's Place, Aldgate,
in 1722, and after this London began to be looked upon as a place of
refuge for distressed Jews from the Continent. All European distur-
bances in which the Jews were sufferers stimulated the migration to
England. There were persecutions in Bohemia in 1744. The war that
ended with the partition of Poland in 1772 brought a fresh influx.
During the siege of Gibraltar in 1781 several shiploads of Moroccan
Jews who had settled there managed to escape to England. These
immigrants were for the most part poor, and came to England relying
on the charity of the Jews of the Sephardim, to whom they were far
from welcome, and from about the middle of the century die burden
became increasingly heavy.57
The outburst of anti-Jewish feeling which led to the immediate
repeal of the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, though largely the
result of violent and unreasoning prejudice, fostered by certain City
interests, had some economic excuse. It was maintained that it
... would deluge the kingdom with brokers, usurers and beggars... that the
rich Jews would purchase lands ... and influence the Church of Christ...
that the lower class of that nation would interfere with the industrious natives
who earn their livelihood by their labour, and by dint of the most parsimoni-
ous frugality, to which the English were strangers, work at an under price, so
as not only to share, but even in a manner exclude them from all employ-
ment. ,
58
The fear that Jewish labour would undercut English workmen was not
justified in the eighteenth century. It was the misfortune of the Jews
that they were virtually excluded from industrial employment by the
impossibility of their apprenticeship to a Christian master.
The history of the poorer London Jews in the earlier eighteenth
century is obscure; the Jewish Synagogue accepted responsibility for
them, and it was apparently not till after 1770 that it was realized that
Jewish immigration constituted a social problem. For this reason the
life history of certain Jews which has survived because they formed
part of a- gang of thieves is of great interest as showing their curiously